Rabat – In this document, I synthesize the arguments that have been raised and discussed recently among intellectuals, in the press as well as by people in cafés and in homes after the London and the Charam-Echeick blasts in the perspective of the cross culture seminar. Any shortcomings in the analyses and illustrations are mine, however.
What do extremist Islamists want? What are their objectives? What do they expect from attacking Western countries? How are Western countries reacting to these attacks?
As to the major objective of contemporary extremist Islamism in the West, it would seem that it is to bring Western democracies to accept a new distribution of power and of ideological influence in the world. Arab countries as well as non Arab countries with Islamic historical traditions have been under various but direct economic, political and ideological influences of different Western powers. With the fall of the Soviet block and the rise of the supremacy of one single pole, it became easier to focus efforts on a single enemy. In the past, Islamism had to face up both to atheist communist ideologies and to Judaeo-Christian capitalistic imperialism which meant fighting the rest of the world, on different fronts, but without a coherent ideology and a single discourse. Actions against any of the past ideologies were interpreted as isolated acts of some loonies or fanatics with no popular or mass human support and were said to be the responsibility of small groups under the leadership of isolated individual figures.
With the current increasing polarization of ideologies, however, the stereotype of Islamism has recovered the vigor to oppose the same ideology and the same discourse to the rest of the world, both Muslim and non Muslim. The stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs as a single community sharing the same hegemonic political intention and therefore expressing a political consensus serves to validate the attitudes towards what is presented as one nation characterized both by race and religion and motivated by an intrinsic complex of hostility and extreme dislike of anything Western and Judaeo-Christian. The stereotype evokes the permanence of a threat of the happiness, the safety, the liberty and the physical integrity of Judo-Christians. The more recent association of oil resources to the Arab region has expanded the range of the stereotype to include the threat against the economic wellbeing and the political stability of the West and to further foster the image of the greedy and insatiable Arab.
Globalization seems thus to have, on the one hand, resulted in increased polarization of ideologies and, on the other hand, to have contributed to collapsing diverse identities in reduced stereotypes.
The schism has been consumed from the moment the leadership of the most powerful representative of Western democracies proceeded to confirm the division of the world into good and evil and since sleeping demons had been conjured with the invocation of concepts such as “crusade”, which of course refers to “holy wars” opposing Islam and Christianity and since the media have been successful in cultivating the image of an Islamic ideology challenging the natural and historical rights of the West over the rest of the world civilizations. Of course, the stereotype excludes from this opposition such historical facts as those consisting of Jews finding refuge in the land of Islam during the various Christian inquisitions the last of which as recent as the forties of the twentieth century. The schism is being widened on a daily basis by the hateful images which many an evangelist is spreading through TV shows and other communication channels.
The intention of extremist Islamists is to bring the West to give up its ideological and unlimited economic control over Arab countries and non Arab countries with Islamic historical traditions. All indicators seem to point to the willingness of Western democracies to negotiate and find a modus vivendi with the extremists. Many forms of negotiations are already underway with extremists in Egypt, Morocco and other countries. Courtship ceremonies are to be decoded in language, in acts, in travel destinations of diplomatic missions of both parties and in para-diplomatic actions such as the various forms that scholarship, art and cultural exchange can take.
The West has come to the conclusion that the blasts, the bombings and the other forms of violence against civilians are but episodes of the same and one process. They are presented as small battles of the same global war waged against the West by an Islamic nation standing unified in an unlawful claim of new distribution principles of the goodies of the world. The Islamic movement is thus presented as an ideology which uses violence to claim that political and economic rights, meaning hegemony, should be shared otherwise.
Many observers tend to conclude that the maintained pressures seem to have been rather effective in convincing the West to start seeking ways to negotiate the demanded sharing of hegemony at the expense of democracy and the well-being of the populations in Arab countries and non Arab countries with Islamic historical traditions. This would not be the first time this happens. In fact, once more, capitalism seems to be making choices at the expense of the principles of democracy, human rights, freedom of speech and economic liberalism as it has done so often in the recent past. Muslim Brothers – with an apparent bless of the USA and other Western Democracies are, for instance, challenging the efforts of the current regime to control their development. And in Morocco, the US embassy protects extremist Islamists sued under the provision of law and ensure publicity and promotion actions for them in the USA. US diplomats play ambiguity to express their support to rather extremist movements under the cover of such ideology as protecting freedom of speech and ensuring equal political rights to all. All, in this particular case, includes extremists who do not believe in democracy.
The action of the West does not stop here. In fact, by waging destructive actions against local and national movements that share many ideals with Western democracies, the West is setting the scene for Islamic extremism to take over. It seems that some agencies of Western democracies operating in the various fields of development, culture, art, education, human rights and in civil society – NGOs have already made the decision to move against democratic local organizations that have been struggling for many years to promote democratic culture and the practice of transparency and equal opportunity among genders and all social categories.
In fact, these agencies are undermining the work of these organizations by misinforming the population and the rest of the world about their action and by trying to outdo their performance and their scope by the direct injection of foreign money and human resources whose objective is to comfort non democratic movements. Cases have been documented. The losers in this dangerous game will be those who have, for some reason, opted for the principles of Human Rights, democracy, liberalism, transparency, equal opportunity, gender equity and tolerance all of which are values alien to the extremists which all of a sudden have become privileged interlocutors of some leading Western democracies.
Other mechanisms of neutralizing the effects of political regimes that seem to have made the decision to move towards more democratic institutions include the destabilization of the socio-economic and financial structures of these countries. This is achieved, among other ways, through the implantation of parallel financial systems that do not operate on regular market principles and which serve to suck up wide portions of the population into the concentric whirl of international imperialism. The credibility of this system is ensured through leading figures of the former left and/or of parallel political alternatives leading their action under the cover of development NGOs. The validation of the new imperialistic wave through such figures weakens the power of the political arguments of the emerging democratic local options and reduces the chances of the financial and economic programs that accompany the reforms to attain their objectives. In a way, creating states within emerging democracies to make sure they remain under the control of the West and to avoid such accidents as the Allende experience.
To achieve their objectives, extremists are fighting Western countries on grounds that have, at least on the surface, grown unknown to them. In fact, suicide bombings which express a value of human life that the West does not understand echo the suicide planes crashing on warships during the WWII. They are an unconventional, foreign type of war to which none has been prepared. It is a war using a different type of army, a different type of soldiers, and a different type of weaponry. It takes place on different grounds, fights on different fronts and aggresses targets of different types. No tanks, no warplanes, no warships and no sophisticated automatic machine guns are necessary for this war nor are they sufficient or appropriate to win it. At times, only the rumor of the possible spread of some chemical product is enough to apply most hateful fear on populations and governments. Likewise, no huge standing armies are necessary to fight this new type of war just like the size of armies is irrelevant to winning it.
When the British army moves in, an innocent civilian is shot dead because he happened to look like an Arab or a Muslim to the soldiers or not to speak the same English as the gunmen of one of the best trained armies of the world. His death will not necessitate any formal apologies from the very democratic British government. Worse, it averred that the initial accounts of the operation that led to his shooting were intentionally made-up to cover up the serious pitfalls of one of the best police in the world. A Brazilian young man was taken for an Arab, or a Muslim, who cares, the nuance is not important for the stereotype. In other circumstances, the confusion would not have been so tragic. But when it is the best well trained police of the world that makes the mistake, the life of an innocent person is taken unlawfully and unrightfully.
One suicide soldier can take the lives of hundreds. He/she may even not die while doing it. Remote control technology helping, bringing deadly war to peaceful civilians becomes easier than ordering a cup of coffee. Should he/she die, however, he/she will be claimed as a hero, celebrated as a champion and he/she will be rewarded by direct access to some Heaven where he/she will have all the pleasures he/she had been denied in his/her life. For terrorist strategies, this is the least costly type of army and soldier. They have no need to be paid them down here. Nor do ways of protecting them and sparing their lives need to be imagined; they are trained to die as they kill. They are disposable living weapons. Moreover, once a soldier has gone through the whole recruiting procedure and been initiated in the secrets of an extremist group, he/she cannot withdraw and go back to ordinary life as such a decision would be interpreted as a betrayal of religious precepts.
By their action, extremists do not aim only to kill individuals, but to destroy already fragile economic equilibriums, to pervert the frail stability of economic and social systems and to disrupt a collective psychology that is already struck by severe disorders. Introducing risk, lack of safety and fear in the air transportation system in the USA, in the London tube, at Charam-Echeick, at the Casablanca hotels has more effects than the pain afflicted to individuals, to families and to nations. The effect is economic, social and psychological. The whole way of life as well as the foundations of the economy of those countries are targeted. It was not by chance that the 9/11 planes flew into the Twin Towers, just like it was not by chance that the Casablanca, the London, and Charam-Echeick blasts had been scheduled. All places are economic nerve bundles as well as symbols of a way of life.
The attacks are warnings to whomever is concerned that what is threatened are the foundations of economy and of social life as well as the psychological stability of nations. The blasts and the bombings are messages that the West has read as an actual potential of the extremists to threaten whatever makes and maintains the political, ideological, economic and psychological power and coherence of Western civilization. The message is to prove to whomever is concerned the vulnerability of the very foundations of Western society. This is perhaps why there have been many attempts from the West to start talking with extremists and to seeking ways of integrating them in some new form of global ideological and economic equilibrium.
Will the West be able to imagine a solution like the one that ended WWII in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
What does Islamic extremism want, then? The major objective seems to be a direct control of all countries with an Arabo-Islamic tradition. Killing civilians in different parts of the world does not aim at seizing power in the whole world nor at spreading Islam where it is not already spread. Extremists do not seem to want that, first because they know well that such pretension will be deadly to their own movement. All they want is that the West accepts a new redistribution of power over some parts of the world and that it gives up its support to non-Islamic movements in these countries. Accepting to share political power would also mean having to accept a new attitude to knowledge and to what values are made up with. This would be harder to assimilate. It would not be the first time that the West lets down democracies and human rights activists.
The West must be ready to witness the punishment of individuals who have been supporters of democratic ideals and of every principle and value which democracy stands for by the extremists to whom the West is about to give up the rest of the World. Free individuals will be burnt alive, others will be hanged, others will be beheaded, others will simply disappear and the West will have been part of it all. It will not be the first time, either. More than one witch-hunt and yet more inquisitions have been recorded in the recent history of Western civilization.
Let no one come later to protest or cry out for savagery, for fanaticism or for despotism and dictatorship as has been done years after Saddam had been virtually brought to power by the West and Ben Laden trained and equipped to fight the red flood by the West. Let no one regret the rights of women, of minorities and of tolerance for difference after things will have changed because they will change. Let no one regret the times of political leaders – among whom some monarchs – who were trying hard against all odds to establish the foundations of true and lasting democracies in their countries after the West has promoted fundamentalism and extremism[1] and chosen the wrong allies. The West is about to ally itself to the most dangerous party it had ever known!
[1] By the way, there are other non religious extremisms in the region which very few analysts are aware of. In fact, the West has already allied itself to some and brought them to the political front lines.
To read the first chapter. Second chapter. Third chapter. Fourth chapter
The book, Reflections on the formation of Western opinions, stereotypes and attitudes about Islam and Arabs, published in 2005 is based on a series of reports on Cross Culture seminars the author had conducted at LangCom during academic year 2004-2005. Over two hundred participants from various American universities and many Moroccan university students and English language teacher trainees from ENS Rabat took part in these seminars.
The seminars were a rare opportunity for both Moroccan and American participants to exchange ideas, opinions and attitudes about Islam, Arabism, and the various stereotypes that have come to be associated with them especially after the 9/11 aftermath and the two Gulf wars. They have also been an exceptional occasion for the participants to share thoughts and feelings about the various concepts associated with globalization, westernization and the new challenges of the communication era. The chapters are thus to be read as reports of these seminars.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Morocco World News’ editorial policy
